Helsinki Digital Humanities Hackathon 2021 #DH­H21

Helsinki Di­gital Hu­man­it­ies Hack­a­thon #DH­H21 | 19.–28.5.2021

The Helsinki Digital Humanities Hackathon is a chance to experience an interdisciplinary research project from start to finish within the span of 10 days. For researchers and students from computer science and data science, the hackathon gives the opportunity to test their abstract knowledge against complex real-life problems. For people from the humanities and social sciences, it shows what is possible to achieve with such collaboration. 
 
For both, the hackathon gives the experience of intensely working with people from different backgrounds as part of an interdisciplinary team, as, during the hackathon, each group will develop a digital humanities research project from start to finish. Working together, they will formulate research questions with respect to particular data sets, develop and apply methods and tools to answer them, and present the work at the end of the hackathon. For information on what the hackathon was like in previous years, see #DHH19, #DHH18, #DHH17, #DHH16 and #DHH15.

In 2021, the event will be organized as an online hackathon. As a CLARIN, DARIAH and SSHOC summer school, the event will be truly international welcoming applications from all over Europe. Participation to #DHH21 is free to all accepted participants.

5 ECTS credits may be gained from participating in the hackathon for students in University of Helsinki and other universities.

Timetable and practicalities

The hackathon will take place between 19.–28.5.2021. The participants are expected to commit to the hackathon for the whole period; work takes place mainly between 10 AM and 5 PM (Finland / EEST / UTC+03:00) on weekdays (the weekend is free!). In addition, there will be three pre-sessions on Tuesdays 27.4., 4.5. and 11.5., between 2 – 4 PM for orientation, group formation and preparation for the intensive hackathon period. The participants are expected to attend also these pre-sessions. For more details, see the detailed timetable and further information on practicalities (including prerequisites and credits for students).

Public presentations of the projects will take place on the last day of the hackathon, 28.5.2021.

Ap­plic­a­tion sched­ule for #DH­H21

9.–31.3.2021 Application period
9.4.2021 Applicants informed of acceptance
9.–14.4.2021 Registration to #DHH21 for accepted participants
27.4. & 4.5. & 11.5.2021 Three #DHH21 pre-hackathon preparatory sessions, 2–4PM UTC+03:00
19.–28.5.2021 #DHH21 hackathon online, 10AM – 5PM UTC+03:00

Please note that we can only accept participants who are able to commit to the full week of intensive work (not just a couple of hours here and there), as well as the preparatory sessions. Thus, if you know that you have other commitments during the hackathon, please consider applying next time when you can make a full commitment.

While the general application period has already ended, the application form is still open for applications from pre-agreed special groups (if you're in one of these, you'll already know that).

Themes

This year, the hackathon groups will organize around the following seven themes:

• Finnic oral po­etry – exploring themes, characters and formulas in a highly varying corpus of oral folklore
• Cit­izen ini­ti­at­ives, Twit­ter and journ­al­ism – studying modern-day interaction between digital newsmedia journalism and Twitter.
• Space Wars: The loc­a­tion of re­port­ing the Great War in France, Aus­tria and Fin­land – investigating the places dominating news reporting during the Great War between 1914 and 1918
• Pierre Bayle and Early-Mod­ern Brit­ish Text Re­use Phe­nom­ena – exploring eighteenth-century intertextuality through text reuses surrounding Pierre Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary
• Polit­ics and place in the Finnish par­lia­ment­ary de­bates – looking at the various ways locations get used in political discourse and rhetorics
• Ex­plor­a­tion of society through the lens of la­bour mar­ket re­lated doc­u­ment­a­tion – comparing the coverage, style and subjects discussed in collective labour agreements from more than 50 countries
• Par­laMint: com­par­able cor­pora of par­lia­ment­ary de­bates – comparing parliamentary debates before and during Covid-19 across multiple European parliaments from linguistic, sociological, political and computational perspectives

For more details on the themes, see here.

Or­gan­isa­tion

General organisers:

• Mikko Tolonen, associate professor in computational history at the University of Helsinki
• Eetu Mäkelä, associate professor in human sciences – computing interaction at the University of Helsinki
• Jukka Suomela, associate professor in distributed algorithms, logic and complexity at Aalto University
• Jouni Tuominen, research coordinator at HELDIG, University of Helsinki; staff scientist at Aalto University